Can We Escape the Diabolical Clichés of Coldplay?

Coldplay’s new album, “A Head Full of Dreams,” continues the pattern of exaggerated sentimentality that the band and its front man, Chris Martin, have fallen into.

Photograph by Chad Batka / The New York Times via Redux

In recent years, the writer George Saunders has made the championing of so-called soft virtues—tenderness, forgiveness, patience—something of a personal crusade. “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness,” Saunders said, in a graduation speech to the class of 2013 at Syracuse University. Implicit in that: some unimpeachable advice.

But the question that Saunders’s directive inadvertently raises—how do we embrace a spiritual softness without also embracing the inanities long used to disseminate those ideas?—is, at present, a pressing one. Last week, Coldplay released its seventh studio album, “A Head Full of Dreams.” The vocalist Chris Martin, who was once married to (and then famously “uncoupled” from) the actress Gwyneth Paltrow, is now, the narrative goes, single and having a super-great time! Everything is so super-great that Paltrow is even featured on the record, providing nominally audible backing vocals on “Everglow.” (Other notable contributors include Beyoncé, who sings with Martin on “Hymn for the Weekend,” and President Barack Obama, whose wobbly version of “Amazing Grace,” performed during a rousing eulogy for Reverend Clementa Pinckney, is sampled on “Kaleidoscope.”) The album’s posture is celebratory: it is a remarkable time to be alive.

I know in my heart that it is wrong to parse song lyrics like bits of literature. Lyrics are not poems. They don’t need to (and, perhaps, simply cannot) operate by the same rules and dicta. It is unfair to divorce a song’s language from its preordained, mandatory bedfellows, melody, rhythm, and instrumentation; it is unfair to hold lyrics to the same standards of coherence, beauty, and crispness we might employ when considering words on a page. Musically, “A Head Full of Dreams” is cool and gleaming, an iteration of the kind of majestic soft rock that Coldplay has been reliably making for the last fifteen years. And yet, listening to the lyrics of “A Head Full of Dreams,” it is impossible not to develop deeply unkind thoughts regarding the aesthetic value of a line like “Everything you want’s a dream away!”

I do not wish to question Martin’s intoxication with life itself—may we all one day have occasion to earnestly announce “Amazing day!” four times in a row—but one wonders how it became acceptable to articulate ecstatic feelings using only banalities. Even the track titles—“Fun,” “Adventure of a Lifetime,” “Hymn for the Weekend”—are toothless enough to rile the cynical hobgoblin latent in my being, and, in fact, to shake that hobgoblin into a kind of drooling, wild-eyed fury-state. When, in “Up&Up,” the album’s closing track, Martin asks, “How can people suffer? How can people part? How can people struggle? How can people break your heart?,” it is challenging for me not to emit the kind of noise a cat makes when you accidentally step on his tail. (That those queries are trailed by a jaunty guitar solo doesn’t much help.)

Questions of anguish and woe are real—philosophers and the religious faithful have been mulling them for millennia—but surely there is a way to phrase them that does not facilitate vertigo. Surely it is the artist’s job to advance a conversation, not merely reduce it to clichés. Sometimes, listening to “A Head Full of Dreams,” one feels as if our very humanity—the tangle of complex feelings and reactions at the center of every person—is being bludgeoned into pulp by a large bouquet of pink carnations.

“Life is a drink,” Martin chirps. Is this not very dumb? Is there not a way to probe these same ideas using richer, more precise, less predictable language? To effectively express pathos without either dousing it in irony or allowing it to sound so silly? Pop music has always permitted lyrical ingenuity, honoring wit and passion. (That does not mean, of course, that corny or nonsensical lyrics are remotely a new phenomenon—they are not.) Still, profundity is not even required these days; merely the unexpected can be delightful. Recall Kanye West, in 2013, bellowing in a terrifically agitated manner: “In a French-ass restaurant, hurry up with my damn croissants!”

I am hardly immune to sentimentality: let she who has not blinked back tears in a Duane Reade while Boyz II Men played on the in-store sound system cast the first eye roll. The sort of uncomplicated, risk-free sappiness (from “Everglow”: “This particular diamond was extra-special”) peddled by a band like Coldplay feels suspicious precisely because it’s so effective. If a person finds herself in an emotionally compromised state—contemplating an unexpected kindness, say, or recalling a loss—and is then exposed, either willingly or via her dentist’s satellite-radio station, to a certain kind of mawkish emoting, the transaction starts to feel not just facile, but actually diabolical.

Maybe, for some, the broadcasting of sentimentality encourages a real release. But folk wisdom warns against the free lunch—against getting a reward without doing any work. Consequently, it’s hard to know how to process the experience of reacting to pap. In her essay “In Defense of Saccharin(e),” Leslie Jamison writes, “Bad movies and bad writing and easy clichés still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it.”

Coldplay has not always been quite so easy—there was a time where it was compared more frequently to (ambitious) Radiohead than (pleasing) U2. The band’s major hit “Yellow” did not paint Martin as an emerging Whitman, exactly, but it did center around the odd, recurring line “It was all yellow,” which is at least evocative and, I’d argue, nearly lovely—it hints at the way our memories of a person or place can sometimes be supplanted entirely by some other, less complicated sense-experience. When Martin finally comes around to an admission of self-sacrifice—“For you, I’d bleed myself dry”—it feels something like a catharsis.

Since “Yellow,” Coldplay has sold more than eighty million albums worldwide and been nominated for a Grammy twenty-five times (it has won seven). Given the frank exceptionality of those numbers, there is a specious argument to make here about resonance and communion and what it means, qualitatively speaking, to reach huge numbers of people with your art. There is, of course, an equally specious argument to make about how mass appreciation of that kind should make us all instantly and severely wary. As we lurch toward a new year, attempting to cultivate true kindness in our hearts, do we require a new language in which to describe wonder, compassion, beauty?

“Don’t ever give up” is what Martin would say to us. (He does say it.) “Believe in love.”

Bieber has been mindfully expressing remorse for most of 2015. What, precisely, he is apologizing for remains unclear.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.